Hodir testing on the PTR, with video

I knew I wasn’t going to be able to try this with my guild, as the limited testing times are restricted to American and European prime-time hours, so I had a chat to my esteemed blogging colleague Matt, of World of Matticus, and mentioned that I’d love to help test Ulduar on the PTR with him.

Well, Matt set up <Years Behind> on Broxigar, and – apart from constant world server failures, lag, UI problems and all the other symptoms of a test server – away we went!

Here’s a video of one attempt; sadly we didn’t get much testing time, as we spent an hour or so fighting constant disconnects and insane lag, but it was enough to get an idea of the encounter and what’s involved.

(You can view the video here on YouTube for a higher-quality copy; I’ll replace this with a better link and embed once I’ve sorted out better video hosting.)

Here are my notes, after some research from our attempts
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1. There are 4 frozen npc’s in the middle. It looks like you can only break 2 in normal and break 4 in heroic. They help you out abd give you buffs.
a. Druid light circle gives a haste buff.
b. I dont know what the rest do.

2. Hodir has 10m/30m health. All attacks are melee/frost based.

3. Instead of watching for aoe on the ground, watch for aoe from the air. If you see a light snow falling on you, run out of it, a giant rock will crash on you.

4. Hodir does a frost aura, much like Keristraza’s aura. You cannot jump though, you have to move. It does 200 damage initially, then as it stacks it goes up.. 200 400 800 1600 3200 6400 and so on. On heroic, it starts at 400 iirc.

5. Around 45 seconds (and 10-20 seconds thereafter) he starts doing something called Flash Freeze. It has a 9 second cast, and will hit everyone in the room regardless of los. To not get frozen, stand in the patches of snow/light, this seems buggy at the moment. If you do get frozen, A player has to break your ice tomb. You will also be taking damage from the aura.

6. He gains an enrage ability that reduces his physical damage by 70%, but makes his melee attacks do 17/25k frost damage (40k on heroic). We are unsure yet what this is caused by; if it is a self buff or if it is triggered.

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